Presented without comment

Tim Worstall’s piece accusing Compass and me of promoting “fascist economic policy” is a libellous smokescreen, hiding the fact that it is the very free market economic policies that he promotes that are bringing about the economic stresses and rising insecurity that allow and will continue to encourage the rise of the extreme Right.

The market systems that have evolved in tandem with mechanized production, leveraged by non-human, non-animal, widely available and transferable energy; systems that have never been totally “free” from social and political constraints in their patterns of self-regulation, baffle these “progressives” and so they turn to control of production, through attempts to control its objects, principally by political means – and politics today is the representation and advancement of interests.

Upon reading the terms “environmental activist” and “progressive protectionism” in the same sentence I instinctively want to reach for a gun. Happily, since leaving England, there’s a 9mm to hand right to hand, holstered on my hip.

The rest of Hines’ piece comes off as rather stilted and clumsy, liberally salted with the “big words” that those of limited intellect use indiscriminately in an attempt to borrow gravitas.

I know nothing of Mr Hines, save for this article. He may be a very clever man, for all I know, but this piece portrays him as the type of idiot that one often meets in a pub, drunk and overreaching.

Indeed.
If a company seeks to maximise profits by currying government favour, it’s actually doing The Right Thing, at least w.r.t. it’s obligation to its shareholders. It’s the government that is, as ever, the problem.

So according to Hines, open markets and international competitiveness “invariably results in politicians being forced to drive down tax rates, constrain social and environmental improvements and preside over the eradication of countless local jobs and small business opportunities.” The first two are features, not bugs, and the last one is simply false.

Hines wants the government to control everything, even if it doesn’t actually (de jure) own the means of production. That’s a textbook definition of fascism.

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